It seems like the links on the highway key are basically becoming crowded. As more and more proposals create more and more links, the key will become crowded with lots of link highways. In my opinion, I think we should use the regular tag values + another tag. For example, I quickly came up with link=yes. I want to know if this is your opinion too!
Your poll didn’t quite work!
Where do you see “proposals create more and more links”? No one has suggested new highway=*_link . The ones that exist are using footway= , cycleway= path= =link . (but also they include a different definition that I don’t like)
link= doesn’t work well, as it has been used for link=microwave in type=link for directed communications, and is a common mistake for website= or url= . It is subject to misinterpretation.
One of my ideas collected Proposal:More road details - OpenStreetMap Wiki is to adopt usage= from railway= (because service= is already used for highway=service ), waterway= , and =pipeline to replace side_road= , and show local-express roadways (from the horrors of a westbound_collector_lanes role https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/1248024 , and name= being used for descriptor labels) for both of them. So usage=link is a natural by-product.
I agree with @Kovoschiz on this. I just use usage=link for highway types that do not have a _link variant.
For example:
As if the usage key wasn’t used for enough different things already…
I fixed it
I know of Proposal:Road schema which would add:
I’ll try and resist the urge to channel my inner Roger Mellie in response to this.
That wiki page was created in 2018 and seems to have been ignored ever since. If you look in taginfo and search for “link” among the values you’ll see only:
motorway_link
trunk_link
primary_link
secondary_link
tertiary_link
It is unfortunately easy for anyone to create a wiki page that might mislead other people into thinking that a particular tagging approach has some traction with the wider OSM community. The creation of a new wiki page doesn’t set off any alarm bells anywhere, and nor does the existence of OSM wiki pages that contradict each other, so this stuff sticks around to confuse even more people.
I was only inspired by usage=main . Ideally I want something else too, as they are used differently for sections of rail vs parallel roadways here for now. It could be applied to off-line route=road sections of the same ref= somehow, eg M25 spur. It’s not the same as modifier= , as those are numbered differently.
Longer examples on E1A Shin-Tomei and Shin-Meishin connectors in Japan. E68 Fuji-Yoshida Route of the otherwise E20 Chuo Expressway officially is tricky. Another standard situation is the bypassed section of a national route continuing to exist together with the bypass.